Slides

In 1955, when I was nine years old and my sister was ten, my father bought his first 35 mm camera with money he didn’t have and dragged us and my mother on a cross-country trip for the opening of Disneyland. He went crazy taking pictures of us standing at the edge of cliffs, holding snakes, showing scrapes and bruises, and pretending to be happy. At the time I wanted to smash that old Kodak to smithereens. But now, of course, I am very grateful for that camera.

Clack-click. Here is a picture of our Chevy station wagon, navy blue body with a white roof, its rhombus shadow sprawled over a gas station in Iowa. We left our apartment in the middle of the night because the car and its roof rack were piled with belongings, like the Joads’ jalopy in The Grapes of Wrath, and my father did not want the landlord to know we had no intention of coming back.

In the slide, the car glints in the early-morning light, clean from the terrifying thunderstorm we drove through all night. Once, lightning even struck the car, and this slide’s crisp detail shows the burn mark in the door where the bolt struck.

In the background is a billboard for Chesterfield cigarettes, with a picture of a man and woman breezing along in a convertible, laughing and smoking, hair windswept, very happy. No children. But in our Chevy, my sister and I are slouched in the back, wedged between mounds of suitcases, bedding, and camera equipment, looking glum. Maybe we were just waking up. My mother is standing next to the car door, pointing to the place the lightning struck and smiling with staged relief. She sure as hell didn’t smile during the storm. She is wearing powder blue pedal pushers and a pink-and-white wing-collar blouse with a palm-tree print, the fronds of which you can make out in the slide’s stunning resolution. (No modern digital camera can come close.) On her feet are pink canvas shoes with straps that wrap around her ankles. A scarf covers her head and is knotted severely under her chin. You can see every hair curl trying to escape.

As my father aims the Kodak, his shadow claws across the asphalt, up a gas pump, jaggedly slicing a crimson pop machine. After he took this shot, my mother bought a grape Nehi, took a swig herself, then handed it to my sister and me. The bottle is not in this picture, but such is the power of slides to remind you. The colors are so vibrant that the images are almost three-dimensional — living, breathing things.

Even after all these years, that old pop machine makes me ache for a Nehi, which didn’t taste anything remotely like a grape but was so sweet it almost made me forget the terror of the storm. The machine was a horizontal tub with a heavy-hinged lid and ice on the bottom. You had to pull your preferred bottle by its cap along a metal hanger to a kind of holding pen that, when you put in your nickel, released a trap door and allowed you to lift the bottle. It reminds me of the old Union Stockyards, where they prodded cattle through a labyrinth of pens and gates to slaughter. There was no place to escape, only the illusion of free will.

My father’s prodding device was his new camera, a Kodak SLR, which he bought instead of paying our last month’s rent. We were going to be living out of suitcases for the next few weeks anyhow, he reasoned. We’d just find a new place to live when we got back. That’s why my sister and I got smushed in with so much crap in the back of the station wagon — crap that included slide film, lenses, a tripod, a light meter, a flash bracket and bulb, and still more film.

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